Michael Olenick: We Teach MBAs To Apologize About The Best Tool They Have

The robots are coming for your job, say the digiterati. We’ve heard this one, more recently and throughout history. The latest cure, prescribed in unison by Silicon Valley billionaires and the policy think tanks that orbit them, is Universal Basic Income. When the algorithms eat the labor market, the government mails everyone a check. Survival by direct deposit.

Tidy. Humane-sounding. Wrong.

Not wrong because the anxiety is fake. Wrong because we already have a better answer, and we’ve spent a generation teaching MBAs to apologize for it.

Capitalism is the least imperfect engine humanity has ever built for dragging people out of misery. That’s not ideology. That’s the scoreboard. Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a track record that no central planning committee, no charitable trust, and no government transfer program has ever come within a country mile of matching. UBI can keep a person alive but is unlikely to make them whole.

I know this because I dug into the subject, writing two cases at INSEAD.

FARMING PROSPERITY

Let’s start on Lake Victoria, in Kenya, before Victory Farms showed up.

Wild fish stocks were collapsing. Overfishing had stripped the lake. Fishermen raced each other to the bottom, hauling in less every season. And the women who ran the roadside fish stalls, the backbone of the local food economy, had to secure supply somehow. So, they traded sex for fish. Routinely. As a market mechanism. This wasn’t the exception; it became the norm.

Roughly half the people in that fishing economy were HIV positive. That was not a tragedy happening alongside the economy. That was the economy. Scarcity, doing what scarcity does.

No NGO fixed it. A barren, abandoned field next to the farm sits as a monument to an NGO that took the money and went home.

Victory Farms fixed it. Not with a sermon. Not with a grant. With farmed tilapia, sold at a competitive price, reliably, every single day distributed to regular stores around Kenya. That one move detonated the whole arrangement. The women got a clean, professional, dignified supply chain. The lake started healing because nobody was racing to strip it anymore. People got reliable high-quality protein. And the company? Today it’s the 15th fastest-growing firm in Africa and the largest employer in Homa Bay County, paying four times the local minimum wage.

When a politician or a small-time strongman wanders in looking to skim, the locals shoo him off. They’ve tasted what the alternative looks like and they’re not going back.

Charity sustains. Markets compound.

THE WELDER WHO OUT-HELPED BILL GATES

Now go to rural Tamil Nadu and meet Arunachalam Muruganantham.

Barely literate. A welder. Spent five years in grinding poverty chasing one idea: a cheap machine that lets rural women make their own sanitary pads. His village decided he was possessed. His family left him over it. He kept going anyway.

His breakthrough wasn’t the machine. Plenty of people can build a machine. His breakthrough was a business model. Finance the equipment locally. Let women manufacture the pads and sell them, woman to woman, sidestepping the taboo that made walking up to a male shopkeeper for menstrual products simply impossible. No foreign capital. No NGO.

Muruganantham talks about dodging minefields. Asked if he meant the minefields of ancient superstition and misogyny, he says no; literal minefields communists had laid around the first village he visited. Avoid the flowers, the locals said, they look pretty but that’s where the communists have laid the mines. Seems there’s a powerful metaphor there.

In any event, forty-two million women later, Jayaashree Industries has rewired the health, hygiene, and economic independence of a population larger than most countries.

Arun once shared a stage sitting between Bill Gates and Francis Collins. He’s a quiet, modest man, so he won’t say the thing everyone in the room already knows: by most honest measures, he’s done more for the world’s girls and women than the two of them put together. His customers aren’t beneficiaries. They’re owners. Their physical, spiritual, and financial health improved due to his business model.

THE THING BUSINESS SCHOOLS KEEP APOLOGIZING FOR

Two companies. Two deep, ugly, generational human crises that charity either flubbed or never bothered to touch. Both solved. Not as a side project, not as a CSR line item, but as the structural byproduct of building a balance sheet that actually closes.

This is the part we’ve gotten exactly backwards.

The UBI pitch assumes the market is the disease and redistribution is the medicine. Victory Farms and Jayaashree are the counterexample sitting in plain sight: the market, aimed at a real problem is the medicine. The question was never whether desperate people need a floor. The question is who builds a foundation, and whether whatever is built on top still stands when the donors run out of champagne for their parties and fly home.

“Business as a Force for Good” has been demoted to a slogan, a slide you skip past on the way to the finance lecture. It belongs at the center of the curriculum as a hard commercial discipline. Market design is the single most powerful lever for human development ever invented, and we are graduating people who think it’s something to feel slightly guilty about.

I don’t want two examples. I want two hundred. I wrote these cases because I wanted proof, and the proof is overwhelming, and there is no reason on earth it should stay this rare.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand still does the best magic trick we’ve got. It doesn’t pull a rabbit out of a hat. It pulls millions out of poverty, and it keeps pulling long after the audience has packed up and left.

The only question left is whether we’re going to teach the next generation how to do the trick. Or just keep handing out checks and calling it compassion.

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Michael Olenick, JD, is a former INSEAD research fellow and founder of VSTRAT.ai. He has spent four decades building AI and expert systems; his research has been used at INSEAD and, before then, cited by Congress and media on how to resolve the 2008 era financial crisis. Michael currently lives with his partner, Anastassia, in Austin, Texas.

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